


The Negative Confessions

by A_Eleanor



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depending on how you look at it might have a happy ending?, Eventual Romance, F/M, First War with Voldemort, M/M, Order of the Phoenix - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23398015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Eleanor/pseuds/A_Eleanor
Summary: It is the beginning of the First Wizarding War. Lily Evans is working as a journalist, trying to stay out of harm's way. But when a series of mysteries lead her to hunt down Severus Snape, she must decide whether to turn her back on the truth or to risk her life to find justice in a world gone mad.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Lily Evans Potter/Severus Snape, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	The Negative Confessions

**Author's Note:**

> This story is operating from a single idea: what if the First Wizarding War starting in earnest when Lily was in her twenties, rather than being declared in 1970? The timeline of relationships diverges from canon. At the beginning of The Negative Confessions Lily and James are not in a relationship, and she is not in the Order of the Phoenix. This will also mean that Lily and James don't die until they are older, rather than on Halloween of 1981. This doesn't necessarily alter the events of the books, just pushes them forward in time by a few years.

_October 1980_

463 Downwater Street was the topmost flat in a rather ugly old brick building in a quiet backstreet of London, quite away from the muggle thoroughfares and tucked away in a corner shadowed by a majestic elm.

The building was incredibly ordinary. Nothing strange or fantastic ever seemed to happen there. In fact, it was the plainness of the area that appealed to the occupant of 463 Downwater. She had been looking for just this kind of place. Somewhere uncharted by magic, somewhere where she could hide.

It was night when Lily arrived, apparating beneath the old elm and looking furtively around herself to be sure there was no one on the street. It was raining hard, and it obscured the roadway. The lights from the lampposts looked distant and fuzzy. Blinking water out of her eyes she crossed the street and stepped into the small lobby of her building, flicking down her hood and shaking water from her long hair. It was a moment before she noticed the woman standing in the corner of the room, next to the elevators.

She was fairly tall, but she was stooping, and her clothes were dark and wet. She was clutching a handbag in front of her and looking to be trembling. When she spotted Lily she seemed to straighten somewhat, and regained some of her old familiarity.

“Lily I need to speak with you,” she said, her voice surprisingly sharp and commanding despite her circumstances.

“Mrs. Snape.” Lily walked toward her, aiming for the stairwell and feeling surreptitiously for her wand. “It’s been a long time.”

“Lily it’s about my son.”

They were very near each other now. So near that Lily could see the threads of grey in her dark hair, and the fraying seams of her robes. The woman had once been strangely beautiful. Striking, certainly. Lily remembered seeing her standing by the small fence in front of Severus’s house, clutching at the gate and demanding the boy return home immediately. She had always held an unapproachable power. Now she was staring at Lily with desperate, hungry eyes.

“Severus and I haven’t spoken in quite some time,” said Lily evenly, side-stepping the woman and heading toward the stairs.

But Eileen Snape would not be dismissed so easily. She grabbed Lily’s arm and yanked her backward with an unusually strong grip, her long fingers clawing at Lily’s sleeves. “It’s been two years since I saw Severus. I don’t know if he is alive or dead. I can’t reach him. I don’t know where he is. I have something I need to tell him.”

“Let go of me!” Lily snapped, but she still turned and faced the woman, interest and some shade of concern making her pause. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

“You know my boy. You have to find him, please, and tell him something. For me.”

“Why?”

“Because he wants nothing to do with me anymore, but I _need_ to tell him something. Lily I worry for him.” Her voice was fervent and low, her tone plaintive. The desperation seemed to roll off her in waves.

“Even if I wanted to find him, he wouldn’t want to see me, Mrs. Snape. He hates people like me.”

“But never you, Lily.”

It always seemed to come back to this. Lily remembered having this same argument with Severus, once upon a time. This distinction was not enough. That she could be the exception, the muggleborn that was allowed to exist –– it disgusted her. Mrs. Snape didn’t seem to see any problem with this, either. She was looking at Lily with the placating expression of someone who felt they had neatly solved a moral quandary.

“I can’t help you.” Pulling her arm away she stalked up the stairs. She was nearly at the top of the stairwell when she heard Mrs. Snape calling from below.

“His father died! That’s what you need to tell him! His father is dead!”

_Stubborn old cow. Didn’t she hear that I couldn’t help?_ Lily thought, rather nastily.

When she got to her door she unlocked it the muggle way, her flimsy key twisting in the equally flimsy lock, and then murmured the password to unravel the security spells she’d placed on the place. Protective enchantments like the ones Lily had cast over her flat were something that really should be done by a more experienced witch or wizard, but Lily had none available so she’d been forced to do them herself. She only hoped that she had done them well enough that they would hold if there was a real intruder.

Once inside she flipped the light switch and the living room was flooded with warm electric light. That was one of the nicer things about living in a muggle flat: the wiring. She had never quite gotten used to magical lights. She still preferred more muggle-standard forms of illumination.

“I’m home,” she said, to no one in particular, and she kicked off her shoes, shrugged off her coat, and made her way into the kitchen.

Lily’s kitchen was quite possibly the nicest thing in the whole apartment. The backsplash was tiled a warm cream colour, and the counters were lovely hard granite––quite rare to find. The cupboards were all made of the same honey-coloured wood, and the window over the sink overlooked the street below. The glasses was obscured by rivulets of water and hissing rain, but normally it offered quite a lovely view.

While she made herself some supper she listened to the wireless, which was as dire as usual, and tried to distract herself from any thoughts of Eileen Snape or her son. It was not successful, but she tried her best. Despite her best efforts her thoughts kept circling back to her former friend, thinking of the last time she’d seen him: his dark form disappearing through the crowd at their graduation. What was he doing now? Was he so deep in the dark arts that he no longer wanted to associate even with his own mother? Or had some horrible fate befallen him? But she just ended up circling around these worries, surprised and uncomfortable with her own concern.

She was just settling down to eat when there was a tapping on the window. A beleaguered bird, which Lily recognized to be Remus’s grey owl, Atticus, was perched on the window ledge. Jumping up, she went to the window and opened it, letting the owl limp in and fluff out its feathers, casting raindrops everywhere. Then it extended its leg to her, his expression mournful, and she untied the letter.

Remus’s thin, lilting script was immediately recognizable. He’d written a fairly short letter, but the lines were close together and difficult to read. She squinted at it for a moment and then settled down beneath the nearest lamp.

_Dear Lily,_

_I hope you are doing fine. I am doing extremely well. Although the weather has been oppressive, I am finding ways to amuse myself. I have recently developed quite an interest in quidditch, which I think you’ll find fairly amusing given my disdain for it in our school years._

_Stay safe._

_Much love,_

_Remus L._

She chuckled, even as her stomach churned. It was a simple substitution cypher (using varying, subtle boldness of the letters), one they had used many times before. If she could recall, it had been invented by Francis Bacon, making it all the more ingenious. The kinds of people who were trying to read their letters were also exactly the sort of people who would never deign to learn about a muggle scientist.

Grabbing a pen and paper she jotted down the bolding pattern and translated it into the alphabet.

_Meet me at the Viper & Lamb at 7pm tomorrow._

Lily felt another nervous jolt. Normally they only wrote letters back and forth because it was the safest way to communicate. As long as they used code and different owls they could write extensive correspondence. Meeting up was an entirely different question. Remus was in a far more dangerous position than Lily, whose front as a journalist kept her out of too much trouble. Meeting together meant that he had to tell her something important, something that couldn’t be said through the mail.

Lily wrote back a swift, coded reply and sent Atticus back out into the rain.

_The Viper & Child _was a small muggle pub in a fairly poor area of London. It had shabby decor and a crabby bartender whose drinks were at best subpar. Its greatest qualities were that it was a murky, out of the way place, and that it was muggle. Lily apparated behind a dumpster around the corner, and walked briskly to the pub. She was wearing jeans and a muggle raincoat, but her wand was in her pocket. She closed her fingers protectively around it, her pulse jumped sharply as the lid of a trashcan banged in the wind.

Ducking her head, she stepped into the dimly lit interior of the pub, looking around for Remus. She saw him tucked away in a back corner in a booth, his head lowered over a pint. He was wearing an old knit sweater and jeans, with a heavy jacket over top. When he looked up at her, he had a scruffy beard. She hardly recognized him.

She ordered a pint and brought it over to the booth, sliding in across from him.

“Take off your jacket,” he said.

“Why? You haven’t.”

He shrugged out of his. “We ought to look comfortable.”

Lily did as he said, gripping her beer tightly. “Why did you ask me here?”

“You’re certain you weren’t followed?” Remus glanced over her head, his bright blue eyes roving around the pub for a moment before landing back on her face. He looked much older than when she’d last seen him. The look in his eyes was akin to that of Severus’s mother, and the correlation made Lily feel a little sick.

“I wasn’t followed.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Remus, what’s going on?”

“I’ve lost contact with Florence.”

“What!”

He nodded gravely. “I haven’t heard from her in two weeks. We had a meeting place we were supposed to go to if she needed help. It’s been under surveillance, but she hasn’t turned up.”

“You don’t think she’s…?”

But there was hardly a question of that anymore.

Remus was silent for a while. “The last thing I heard from her she sent me this. Left it for me in the place we’d agreed on.” He slid a piece of paper across the grubby tabletop. Lily bent down to look at it more closely. It read:

_FLZSFDQ IUEFR_

“But it’s just… letters, Remus.”

Remus tapped a complicated pattern on the table which she couldn’t follow. She had heard of encryption spells like this before: messages that could only be decrypted through certain sound patterns. She had never seen one in practice before. A moment later the letters had re-ordered themselves to form two words:

_SEVERUS SNAPE_

Lily stared at the sheet. She couldn’t quite think of what to say. The word seemed very dense on the paper, sitting there and staring at her in very dark ink. “What does it mean?” she asked, finally. She looked up at him and saw that he was studying her closely. Lily got the impression that Remus didn’t quite trust her.

“I have no idea. Certainly we all know who Snape _is._ Was it she warning us against him, or asking us to find him? She must have been very desperate if this was all that she had the chance to write.” He took a long drink of his pint. “I was hoping you might have heard from him. You two used to be mates.”

“I haven’t heard from him, no.” Lily paused, then decided to continue. “But last night his mother came to see me, begging for my help to find him. She said she hadn’t heard from him in two years.”

“His mother?” Remus asked, and for the first time he seemed startled out of his paranoia. He furrowed his brows. “She came to _you?_ Why did she think you would be able to find him?”

“Same reason you seem to think I’ll have heard from him,” Lily said bitterly. “We used to be best mates.” She sighed. “You know I haven’t talked to him since the end of fifth year. Not really. We were never friends again after that.”

“So will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Try to find him?”

“I don’t see how I would, even if I wanted to! He was always good at disappearing. Besides, I reckon he’s a dark wizard now. Given what he was like by the time we graduated… given the friends he was keeping.”

Remus finished his glass and put on his jacket. “Thank you Lily. We’ll be in touch.”

“Remus, wait!” She grabbed his arm. “Can you tell me… can you at least tell me if everyone is alright?”

He looked down at her and his expression softened a little. For a moment he looked like he had at Hogwarts: bright eyed and warm, friendly to little first years and the best person to do prefect rounds with. Wicked at a game of chess and quietly proficient in nearly every class. The calm and clear-headed counter to James and Sirius’s flamboyant antics. Remus gently squeezed her hand. “Everyone’s fine.”


End file.
